When we returned to America, and a few years later I reached the age where I could choose an instrument to play in the school band, I was adamant about the tuba. But my elementary school didn't have a small horn for a little guy like me to play, so I was set up with a Sousaphone that was sitting on a special chair in which I crawled into in order to play.
What I don't recall ever hearing back then, although he probably told me, is that my Dad played the Sousaphone when he was in high school. I remember hearing about that later, when I played in high school, and then in college, but I had never seen a photo of my Dad with a horn. That is, until now.
Here's what he discovered a few days ago in the 1947 Tucson High School yearbook, which he then enlarged the best he could and documented for me:
How cool is that?! And here's my son, his grandson, who also played the Sousaphone in high school - and just this week made it into the Penn State Blue Band (stay tuned for more on that)!
Add me in the middle, and that is three generations of Detwiler men holding down the bass line in marching band!
That's impressive and wonderful that you have three generations of sousaphone players in your family. I was interested in taking up brass when in 4th grade (in 1961), but my father insisted one would get a 'sore lip' from playing brass, particularly from trumpet. I mentioned trombone, and my mother said "I'm afraid that would be too big for you". When I mentioned baritone, my father said "Are you crazy? That's almost a tuba!" (However, my father had played baritone in high school, then switched to trumpet because he become bored with the 'oompah-like' baritone music, and I suspect the sore lip largely came from having to walk so far to school during the central PA winters, thus getting chapped.) I ended up playing clarinet (for which my father 'bribed' me by saying that later on I could even learn to play my mother's old Conn alto sax because it's another single-reed instrument). I did well enough on clarinet, and took up bass clarinet in junior high school (Father: "You'll be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none"). A couple years later I took up double bass, which my father assumed it was because a very popular classmate played this instrument (not really, but watching him play convinced me that playing double bass was a lot more fun than playing clarinet), but he didn't object to my doing so. Forward almost 5 decades, and I decided that now that I'm retired, I might want to try brass, so I bought a Conn Director off eBay and enjoyed learning it. I got curious about valves, so I bought a Blessing B-125 trumpet. Hey, I found that valves are great and convenient, so I bought a Sai Musicals euphonium to have something the same range as the trombone, and loved playing this although the valves on this inexpensive Indian 'knock-off' were less reliable. Finally, after listening to Brazilian videos in which the tubas played such wonderful parts, I bought a Conn 20J being sold by a high school band director, and I'm doing well with that (although for a skinny 70 y/o guy like me, the weight is a bit of a challenge when I hoist it up to play--and it feels heavier in my lap than a woman weighing 4 times as much--but not a 'deal-breaker'). For fun I added a Conn 14I baritone as sort of a replacement for the euphonium (which I've kept anyway, partly because the middle register sounds so wonderful on it), and I love the reliable Conn valves and how responsive it is in the lower range (and this instrument certainly isn't "almost a tuba"!).
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have never played sousaphone, when I was in junior high school, I used to make little models of them out of clay and other materials, and even placed them on the little replicas of the chair-stands I also made.